It’s already well-theorized that it’s not cryptocurrency or decentralized finance apps, but gaming that will actually drive blockchain use cases in the real world.
While this has moved many smaller development companies and hobbyist programmers to release their own blockchain-driven games, distributed ledger technology’s reception among mainstay gaming companies has so far largely been neutral.
A new partnership between old players
But that’s about to change in the wake of Ubisoft’s partnership with Ultra, a DLT-driven gaming platform that might be fairly described as Steam on the blockchain. Users can earn digital currency, buy games, and resell them.
Ubisoft is the mainstream gaming giant responsible for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Far Cry, and a whole range of other commercial hits. The company knows how to make and market games that people actually play, and they know how to do it exceptionally well.
The professional, at-scale approach to game development within a blockchain paradigm isn’t exactly common. Most blockchain games nowadays are by passion project developers or small-scale commercial enterprises. Perhaps due to the technology’s association with regulatory uncertainty, game developer heavyweights are mostly keeping blockchain at arm’s length. Except now Ubisoft is going to become a block producer on Ultra’s associated UOS blockchain.
Meaning for the future
This move is purportedly about lending UOS more trust since Ubisoft is such an established company, and its hardware is now part of the ecosystem that approves transactions in UOS tokens that are confirmed by other block producers. It is also not too great a stretch of the imagination to hypothesize that Ubisoft could begin developing blockchain-dependent games for the Ultra platform.
But that’s raw speculation for now. Until then, Ubisoft is lending its hardware and credibility in support of a new crypto gaming project.